A friend of mine visited me with the heavyhearted news of his divorce. His wife had fallen for another man in her workplace. My friend was reluctant to start a fresh life. He said, “I fear the next wife too”. It took me a long time to explain to him that all accidents are not necessarily repeated in life. In many walks of life, our past failures do not interrupt our future prospects, but the same needs to be applied in a failed marriage too.

If you lose your job, you will look for another prospective job. If you wrap up your business, you will start another with more enthusiasm. But if you lose your spouse or wind up your marriage, will you apply the same zeal and hope to your thoughts that remarrying is worthier than new jobs and more profitable than starting a new business? Most of the divorced husbands regard remarriage to be ‘a gamble as certain as a predicted loss’.

Among the divorcees in the North American Muslims, approximately 70% are yet to be remarried. The reasons are many but most prominent is: There is nobody or very few to motivate and educate them to try and live again.

All adventures are risky but not all risks end up in disasters

Men are adventurous by nature and re-pairing after a divorce should also be taken as an exciting adventure. Every adventure comes with a package of hard effort along with future uncertainty and reflections of past failures haunting you. The same applies to a remarriage as much. Prospective jobs are always sought-after even if the previous job left behind scary marks, but the search of a prospective wife comes to a screeching halt after the first divorce. People risk even while crossing roads but fear crossing lives.

Don’t imitate the Western men

The main reasons for Muslim divorces in the West are more Asian in nature than Western; but the main reasons for the divorced Muslim men to avoid remarriage are more Western in nature than Asian is.

In the West, divorce laws are so hard upon the husbands that the whisper is: Boyfriends have more rights than husbands, so better befriend her, enjoy her and drop her. To be on a safer side, they prefer allowing her to earn on her own and spend on her own so that the exit becomes smoother for her without financial worries.

Nevertheless, let us not overlook the fact that for many husbands in the West, one of the most lethal addictions, i.e., alcoholism, is one of the biggest reasons for marital problems like domestic abuse and financial troubles, in addition to compatibility issues. It is for these very reasons that alcohol is a major factor when it comes to marriages breaking up all across the West. So, no wonder that their governments must have imposed laws to protect their women. However, most of the Muslims even in the West don’t imbibe alcohol. Why should they worry about such laws against domestic abuses?

Look at your sons and daughters

A classmate in my school came from a broken family. His father was a businessman and always travelled around, so he enrolled his two motherless sons into a boarding school. The motherless children became fatherless too. They turned to smoking and were also short of self-confidence. The father neither remarried nor kept his children with him. Today, the children are among the thousands of elderly men who are unable to run their own lives while their father is passing a lonely, retired life. Children are your biggest treasures that you would not like to lose but rather you would want to preserve them as assets for your post-retirement life. As they say, if you safeguard their childhood, you can safeguard their manhood. Many fathers lose their children in spite of their presence. They provide the motherless children with toys and gifts but none of these can match up with the love of a mother.

If you are a divorced husband, don’t remain a divorced father. Look for a new good woman and marry her, this time not only for your heart but also for your children’s hearts. One washing machine or an oven or a vacuum cleaner may do the work of hundreds of women, but no machine can replace a mother in a house because, after all, running a house is not entirely about adjusting furniture and washing linens, but it’s all about running the whole family and stitching hearts together.